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US army deserter comes home
Charles Jenkins, a former U.S. Army sergeant who deserted his squad and defected to North Korea 40 years ago returned on Tuesday to the quiet sycamore-lined streets of his native North Carolina, where some residents denounced him as a traitor. Jenkins, then a disgruntled young 24-year-old sergeant spooked by the fear of
service in the Vietnam war, left his post after a night of heavy drinking in
1965 and crossed the snowy frontier into North Korea. On Tuesday, bleary-eyed after a long-haul flight from Tokyo, the 65-year-old came in from the Cold, right into a media scrum at Dulles airport outside Washington, heading for a longed-for reunion with his 91-year-old mother.
Wearing a grey jacket, blue tie, and white shirt, Jenkins, a short man with grey hair once lampooned as a Yankee bad-guy in North Korean propaganda films, refused to describe emotions stirred by his homecoming. Jenkins' mother, 91-year-old Pattie Casper meanwhile awaited a longed for reunion with her son, at a nursing home where she now lives in North Carolina. Mother and son are reported to have had frequent phone conversations since Jenkins went to live on the small Japanese island of Sado with his family.
The former sergeant was accompanied by wife Hitomi Soga and two North Korean-born daughters, Mika 21 and Brinda, 19, in the latest twist to their turbulent tale of espionage, political intrigue and love against the odds. The couple met deep inside North Korea after Soga was kidnapped from Japan and forced to train North Korean spies. The two fell in love in what Jenkins has said was the sole compensation for life. Jenkins was allowed to leave North Korea in July last year and later given a token sentence of detention by a US military court martial, allowing him to start a new life in Japan. For years, Jenkins was presumed to have died in North Korea, but the Pentagon revealed he was still alive in 1996. More details of his fate emerged when his wife and four other kidnap victims were allowed to return to Japan under a 2002 deal between North Korea and Japan. Jenkins, worried about how he would be treated by the US military, stayed back in North Korea, before eventually leaving last year. In his July 2004 court martial, he testified how he had blundered across the border in a drunken stupor, believing the North Koreans would send him on to a third country where he would escape desertion charges. But instead, he was condemned to four decades of virtual house arrest, teaching English, and employing his southern drawl to play the American villain. The US military court gave him a dishonorable discharge and a lenient 30 days' confinement, in a case which theoretically could have landed him with the death penalty. It is unclear what kind of welcome Jenkins will get in his hometown of Rich Square, North Carolina, a farm town of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants some 325 kilometers (200 miles) south of Washington. Friends remember him as a slight youth who loved the military so much he lied about his age to join when he was 15. "He loved the army, and that seemed to be the place for him. He found his place," boyhood friend Michael Cooke told an AFP reporter in 2004. But other North Carolinians have been quoted in the local press in recent days, criticising Jenkins, and his decision to dodge service in Vietnam.
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